2015 Leonard Schaeffer RAND-USC Initiative Fellowships

Dan Han (cohort '13) will be working with John Romley, associate professor in the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California and an economist at the Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics, on a project investigating the relationship between hospital nurse staffing and quality of care.

Dan Han is a doctoral candidate at the Pardee RAND Graduate School and an assistant policy analyst at RAND. She is currently involved in projects examining drug formulary design in Marketplace plans, quality of care for Medicare Advantage plan members, and the impact of high inpatient occupancy on patient outcomes. Prior to joining RAND, Han was a policy research intern at New York City’s Office of Citywide Health Insurance Access. Han graduated from Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, China with a B.S. in preventive medicine. She completed her master’s degree in health policy analysis at New York University, where she worked as a research assistant.

Ujwal Kharel (cohort '11) will be working with Seth Seabury, Associate Professor of Research at the Keck School of Medicine and a Fellow in the Schaeffer Center, on a project examining global trends for occupational injuries. The project will develop country-level estimates for fatal occupational injury counts over the past 25 years.

Ujwal Kharel is a doctoral candidate at the Pardee RAND Graduate School and an assistant policy analyst at RAND. He has a master's degree in engineering management and a bachelor's degree in engineering from Dartmouth College, as well as a bachelor's in physics and economics from Vassar College. He is currently working on his dissertation looking at occupational injury compensation policies for migrant workers in the Persian Gulf region. In addition to occupational health and safety and migration policies, Kharel's interests include health, behavioral experiments, survey research methodology, and education. He has worked on dozens of survey development projects for RAND's MMIC survey system and American Life Panel (ALP).

The fellowship, supported by a gift from Leonard Schaeffer and funding from RAND Health and USC, is to be used for a collaborative research project between a Pardee RAND doctoral candidate and a Schaeffer Center faculty member with the goal of generating future grant proposals and building stronger ties between RAND and the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics. For more about the fellowship, click here.